In the dark: Former Barclays senior executive claims that big banks made it harder for some of the wayward practices to be properly monitored

Big banks kept their independent directors in the dark as much as possible, making it harder for some of the wayward practices leading up to the financial crash to be properly monitored, a leading City director claims.

Jayne Almond, a former executive director of Barclays and Lloyds, told a gathering of senior directors last week that non-executives were ‘given as little information as possible’.

Almond joined Barclays in 2003 when Matt Barrett was chief executive and stayed until 2005 when John Varley had assumed the top role.

She was at Lloyds from 1999 to 2003.

Now chairman of Stonehaven, the equity release mortgage firm, and a non-executive director at Aldermore, Almond suggested the complexity of operations within the big international banks meant it had become extremely difficult for independent directors to monitor behaviour.

Lord Davies, former chairman of Standard Chartered, told the same meeting hosted by wealth management firm Heartwood that he believed traditional boards were no longer able to properly fulfil their oversight on behalf of shareholders.

‘No one can be a specialist in all these complex things,’ he said, referring to products such as derivatives.